Instead of guiding Patients as to what they can expect wouldn’t it be better to focus on providing them with a document that details what was said and shared?

The guide claims to have been designed to reflect “the ambition of the recent inquiry report into Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust which called for patients to be put at the heart of healthcare” but unless I’m very mistaken it seems obvious that the whole reason that this was investigated was not because Patients were vocal about the treatment that they had been receiving but because basic documentation showed that there were particularly high mortality rates amongst patients who had been admitted via A&E.

Of course the poor quality of this documentation meant that it took years to even begin to work out IF this was happening before they could even begin to start asking why but if every Patient admitted to that Hospital Trust had been automatically provided with a fully documented care experience I fail to see how this would’ve come to light much quicker.

Providing Patients with a guidance document outlining what they can expect wouldn’t have made any difference except perhaps for increasing the number of GMC complaints into Doctors. But it’s unlikely that the Hospital would’ve had trouble brushing these off or burying them in complex legalese (eg. there aren’t elevated mortality figures there’s just coding contentions) like they managed to do with the £13M Francis Report.